The Woman in the Library

“Open me carefully.”

The Epigraph, taken from the letters of Emily Dickenson, previews Gentill’s use of letters to drive the narrative and also introduces Gentill’s use of metafiction to encourage the reader to think about reading processes and writing as they make their way through the multiple narratives in the book. The Epigraph also plays on the importance of the opening letter, which seems more ominous on a second reading of the novel.

“As for your enquiries about how my own book is coming: Well, I spent Friday at the library. I wrote a thousand words and deleted fifteen hundred. Regardless, the Boston Public Library is a nice spot in which to be stood up by the muse.”

This scene allows Gentill to characterize Leo A as a thwarted writer with pretensions to the greatness of famous American writers who worked in the library, an important symbol for writing and reading, before him. When Hannah later sets the first scene of the story-within-a-story in the same place, the identical settings show that—unlike Leo—Hannah is capable of writing both what she knows and what she has likely only imagined or heard about secondhand.

“I am a bricklayer without drawings, laying words in sentences, sentences into paragraphs, allowing my walls to twist and turn on whim. There is no framework, just bricks interlocked to support each other into a story. I have no idea what I’m actually building, or if it will stand.”

Freddie Kincaid is a pantser, and the metaphor here is a poetic description of what that approach to writing looks like. The possibility that the wall will collapse is a reference to the risk that comes with pantsing, which is that the plots and characters one develops while drafting without a plan may be dead ends.